The reasonable voice was quiet for a moment.
They will say you did it for yourself, it said finally. They will say the chief executive got her feelings hurt and grounded a flight full of people.
Yes, she thought. Some of them will.
She lifted the phone.
She did not have to look up the number. There were only a handful of numbers she knew by heart anymore, in an age when phones remembered everything, and one of them was the direct line to the duty director's desk at Meridian's Systems Operations Control center in Garden City, Long Island. She had sat at that desk. She had answered that phone at three in the morning on Christmas Eve and in the middle of a snowstorm that shut down every airport from Washington to Boston and on the morning a bird strike in Baltimore had forced an emergency landing with a hundred and forty people on board. She knew the sound it made when it rang. She knew, at this hour on a Tuesday, who would be sitting there to answer it.
She pressed the number and put the phone to her right ear.
She was standing very straight in the aisle. She had not been aware of straightening, but she had, and her blazer, which had been hanging open, she now buttoned with her left hand, without looking, one horn button through one buttonhole. Above her head the overhead bins were closed in a long smooth line of cream panels, and above the bins the ceiling glowed with its even, warm light, which fell directly down on her face and on the shoulders of her suit. She looked straight ahead, down the aisle, toward the walnut bulkhead and the flush wood panel that was the cockpit door. She did not look at the woman in 2A. She did not look at Graham. She waited through one ring, and then two.
On the second ring a man answered. "SOC, Bell."
"Marcus," she said. "It's Naomi."
There was the smallest pause on the line. Marcus Bell had been the senior duty director at Meridian's operations center for nine years. He had trained her, when she came to work there at twenty-two, to read a weather chart and a crew legality report and a maintenance deferral list all at once. He had been in the hospital waiting room the night her father died. He knew her voice. He knew, from the very first syllable, that something was wrong.
"Go ahead," he said.
"I'm on 247 at JFK. Gate B23. Signature cabin."
"Okay." She heard him typing. She could see him in her mind, a broad man in his fifties with reading glasses on top of his head, leaning toward the big curved screens that showed the whole network in real time. "I've got 247. Boarding, doors open, scheduled out eight fifty-five. You're not on my list."
"I know. I booked it myself." She drew one breath. When she spoke again her voice was not the gentle, clear, slightly questioning voice she had used a minute earlier. It was another voice, the one she had learned at the duty desk at three in the morning, the one that left no room at all. She said it slowly, each word separate, laid down like a stone.
"Ground flight 247 immediately."
The silence that followed was not on the phone line. It was in the cabin. It came over the cabin all at once, a kind of collective held breath, the way a room goes quiet when a glass breaks. Even the soft hum of the air conditioning seemed to drop away for a moment beneath it. The words had not been loud. Naomi had not raised her voice. But the cabin was small and it was already listening, and the words had a hard, clean shape to them that carried, and they had gone everywhere at once: to row 1 and row 3 and row 4, to the galley, to the forward door where the gate agent had just stepped aboard with a final paperwork folder, to the seat by the window where a woman in a teal tweed jacket had been looking out at the gray morning.
On the phone, Marcus Bell said, "Copy. Holding 247 at the gate. I'll call the flight deck and the station. Reason?"
"Unresolved passenger and crew issue in the forward cabin. I want the door to stay open until it's resolved."
"Copy." A pause. Very gently, as if she were twenty-two again and sitting at the next console: "You okay?"
"I'm fine," she said. "Make the call."
"Making it now."
She lowered the phone from her ear and held it at her side.
* * *